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Before posting, please read https://www.cgsecurity.org/testdisk.pdf

I have a failing NTFS drive created under Windows XP. The drive is an older IDE one, and has a single partition that takes up the entire 80GB disk. I selected "Intel/PC" for the partition table.

The single FS shows fine After going through the Analyze and Deeper Search, procedures, I was able to recover about 9 GB of the 80 in a few of the smaller directories. However the 3 largest directories do not show when I select option "P" to view the files on the partition, even after a deeper search. These directories are the most important to me.

I'm using a Linux rescue disk with testdisk preinstalled on it, and when I mount the drive to a file system and do an ls -l (the equivalent of dir /w) on the root directory of the drive, it will give some I/O errors on some of the affected directories but eventually I can at least see the directory names listed.

I've not explored some of the advanced options etc, and would appreciate some new ideas and guidance as to what to try next.

I've also been able to recover some of the data by doing just an "rsync" from the failing drive to the new drive. I'm curious as to how an rsync can allow me to recover some more data that testdisk won't even show me the directory listings for. granted the rsync throws MANY i/o errors, but at least some of the files are recoverable

Is there anything further I can do to try and recover these directories? Any and all suggestions welcome.